by Ian Kershaw
From the very outset, the Committee was only empowered to issue enabling ordinances in accordance with the general guidelines he had laid down. It was given no autonomy.38 Hitler reserved, as always, the final decision on anything of significance to himself. It was an exaggeration when Speer later claimed that it had been the intention of the three members of the Committee to control Hitler’s power.39 The loyalty of all three, and their subservience to Hitler’s will, was beyond question. They did nothing in practice which might have conflicted with Hitler’s wishes. And, though Speer emphasized Bormann’s plans to use the Committee to further his own power-ambitions, the head of the Party Chancellery seems to have been largely content in practice to leave the bulk of the routine business to Lammers – hardly a man aiming to take over the Reich.40
The ‘Committee of Three’ had, in all, eleven formal meetings between January and August 1943. The heads of government departments were invited, but the meetings did not amount, as Speer later claimed, to a revival of the cabinet.41 The Committee, for all its potential for aggrandizement of power as a body operating in close proximity to the Führer, rapidly ran up against deeply ingrained vested interests both in government ministries and in Party regional offices concerned to hold on to their personnel and to their spheres of competence which might have been threatened in any move to centralize and simplify the regime’s tangled lines of administration.42 It had little chance of breaking down the fiefdoms on which Nazi rule rested, and soon revealed that any hopes of bringing any order to the Third Reich’s endemic administrative chaos were utterly illusory.
Nevertheless, Hitler’s mightiest subjects were determined to do everything they could to sabotage a development which they saw as inimical to their own power-positions – and from which they had been excluded. The first notions of a challenge to the role of the ‘Committee of Three’ were intimated during the reception in Goebbels’s residence following his ‘total war’ speech on 18 February. Nine days later, Funk, Ley, and Speer met again over cognac and tea in Goebbels’s stately apartments – gloomy now that the light-bulbs had been removed to comply with the new ‘total war’ demands – to see what could be done.43 Soon afterwards, at the beginning of March, Goebbels travelled from Berlin down to Berchtesgaden to plot with Göring a way of sidelining the Committee. Speer had already sounded him out.44 In talks lasting five hours at Göring’s palatial villa on the Obersalzberg, partly with Speer present, the Reich Marshal, dressed in ‘somewhat baroque clothes’,45 was quickly won over.
The ‘Committee of Three’, which he scornfully labelled ‘the three kings’,46 was a worry to him too. He detested Lammers as a ‘super bureaucrat’ who wanted to put the Reich leadership back in the hands of the government officials. Hitler, thought Göring, had not seen through Lammers. It was necessary to open the Führer’s eyes. Bormann was, of course, following his own ambitious ends. Keitel was a complete nonentity.47 Former differences between Göring and Goebbels were waved aside. Göring’s considerable ego had been much deflated through losing favour with Hitler on account of the Luftwaffe’s failure to prevent the bombing of German cities. Goebbels flattered him, and at the same time reproached him for allowing the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich to fall into disuse. The Propaganda Minister’s plan – actually it had initally been suggested by Speer48 – was to revive the Ministerial Council, under Göring’s chairmanship, and to give it the membership to turn it into an effective body to rule the Reich, leaving Hitler free to concentrate on the direction of military affairs. Goebbels spoke of ‘the total lack of a clear leadership in domestic and foreign policy’.49 Göring said that the Führer seemed to him to have aged fifteen years since the start of the war. He had shut himself off too much, and had a mentally and physically unhealthy lifestyle. But there was probably nothing to be done about that.50
Goebbels couched his arguments in terms of loyalty to Hitler, and the need to relieve him of oppressive burdens to free him for military leadership. Hitler’s depressed mood – he had indicated from time to time that death held no fears for him – was, said Goebbels, understandable; all the more reason, then, for his ‘closest friends’ to form ‘a solid phalanx around his person’. He reminded Göring of what threatened if the war were lost: ‘Above all as regards the Jewish Question, we are in it so deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that’s good. A Movement and a people that have burnt their boats fight, from experience, with fewer constraints than those that still have a chance of retreat.’51 The Party needed revitalizing.52 And if Göring could now reactivate the Ministerial Council and put it in the hands of Hitler’s most loyal followers, argued Goebbels, the Führer would surely be in agreement.53
Goebbels suggested that he and Göring approach the appropriate persons. But none of these should be initiated into the actual intention of sidelining the ‘Committee of Three’ and transferring authority to the Ministerial Council. They would choose their moment to put the proposition to Hitler himself. This would, they knew, not be easy, despite Goebbels’s repeated protestations that the Führer would be happy about the idea. Goebbels and Speer undertook to work on Hitler in the interim. Göring and Goebbels would meet again in a fortnight. They did not doubt that they would swiftly master the problem of ‘the three kings’.54
The problem, however, especially as Goebbels saw it, went beyond the ‘Committee of Three’: it was a problem of Hitler himself. Naturally, Goebbels’s own ambitions to take over the direction of the home front – to instil a revolutionary drive into the ‘total war’ effort – played an important part in his scheming. But there was more to it than that. The war had to be won. The prospect of losing it did not bear thinking about. To rescue the war effort, stronger leadership at home was needed. Goebbels remained utterly loyal to the person he had for years regarded as an almost deified father-figure. But he saw in Hitler’s leadership style – his absence from Berlin, his detachment from the people, his almost total preoccupation with military matters, and, above all, his increasing reliance on Bormann for everything concerning domestic matters – a fundamental weakness in the governance of the Reich. A consummate politician himself, Goebbels could scarcely understand how Hitler could neglect politics for the subordinate matter of military command.55
In his diary, Goebbels complained of a ‘leadership crisis’. He thought the problems among the subordinate leaders were so grave that the Führer ought to sweep through them with an iron broom.56 ‘Look at the Minister of the Interior,’ he fumed. ‘At 67 years of age, he [Frick] spends three quarters of the entire year at the Chiemsee’ – the biggest of the beautiful Bavarian lakes, some sixty miles south-east of Munich – ‘instead of carrying out his duties in Berlin. Göring is to be found at Karinhall, Bouhler in Nußdorf,’ their country houses. ‘The entire Reich and Party leadership is on holiday.’ The Führer carried, indeed, a crushing burden through the war. But that was because he would take no decisions to alter the personnel so that he would not need bothering with every trivial matter.57 Goebbels thought – though he expressed it discreetly – that Hitler was too weak to do anything. ‘When a matter is put to him from the most varied sides,’ he wrote, ‘the Führer is sometimes somewhat vacillating (schwankend) in his decisions. He also doesn’t always react correctly to people. A bit of help is needed there.’58
When he had spoken privately in his residence to Speer, Funk, and Ley just over a week after his ‘total war’ speech, he had gone further. According to Speer’s later account, Goebbels had said on that occasion: ‘We have not only a “leadership crisis”, but strictly speaking a “Leader crisis”!’ The others agreed with him. ‘We are sitting here in Berlin. Hitler does not hear what we have to say about the situation. I can’t influence him politically,’ Goebbels bemoaned. ‘I can’t even report to him about the most urgent measures in my area. Everything goes through Bormann. Hitler must be persuaded to come more often to Berlin.’ Goebbels added that Hitler had lost his grip on domestic politics, which Bormann control
led by conveying the impression to the Führer that he still held the reins tightly in his grasp.59 With Bormann given the title, on 12 April, of ‘Secretary of the Führer’, the sense, acutely felt by Goebbels, that the Party Chancellery chief was ‘managing’ Hitler was even further enhanced.60
Goebbels and Speer might lament that Hitler’s hold on domestic affairs had weakened. But when they saw him in early March, intending to put their proposition to him that Göring should head a revamped Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich to direct the home front, it was they who proved weak. Speer had flown to Hitler’s headquarters, temporarily moved back to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, on 5 March to pave the way for a visit by Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister arrived in Vinnitsa three days later. Straight away, Speer urged caution. The continued, almost unhindered, bombing raids on German towns had left Hitler in a foul mood towards Göring and the inadequacies of the Luftwaffe. It was hardly a propitious moment to broach the subject of reinstating the Reich Marshal to the central role in the direction of domestic affairs. Goebbels thought nonetheless that they had to make the attempt.61
At their first meeting, over lunch, Hitler, looking tired but otherwise well, and more lively than of late, launched as usual into a bitter onslaught on the generals who, he claimed, were cheating him wherever they could do so.62 He carried on in the same vein during a private four-hour discussion alone with Goebbels that afternoon. He was furious at Göring, and at the entire Luftwaffe leadership with the exception of the Chief of the General Staff Hans Jeschonnek. Characteristically, Hitler thought the best way of preventing German cities being reduced to heaps of rubble was by responding with ‘terror from our side’.63 Despite his insistence to Speer that they had to go ahead with their proposal, Goebbels evidently concluded during his discussion with Hitler that it would be fruitless to do so. ‘In view of the general mood,’ he noted, ‘I regard it as inopportune to put to the Führer the question of Göring’s political leadership; it’s at present an unsuitable moment. We must defer the business until somewhat later.’64 Any hope of raising the matter, even obliquely, when Goebbels and Speer sat with Hitler by the fireside until late in the night was dashed when news came in of a heavy air-raid on Nuremberg. Hitler fell into a towering rage about Göring and the Luftwaffe leadership. Speer and Goebbels, calming Hitler only with difficulty, postponed their plans. They were never resurrected.65
Goebbels and Speer had failed at the first hurdle. Face to face with Hitler, they felt unable to confront him. Hitler’s fury over Göring was enough to veto even the prospect of any rational discussion about restructuring Reich government. But the problem went further. Goebbels and Speer, blaming distraction through the command of military strategy and Bormann’s deviousness, thought that Hitler was unable or unprepared to sweep through the jungle of conflicting authorities and radicalize the home front as they wanted him to. In this, they were holding to the illusion that the regime was reformable, but that Hitler was unwilling to reform it. What they did not fully grasp was that the shapeless ‘system’ of governance that had emerged was both the inexorable product of Hitler’s personalized rule and the guarantee of his power.
In a modern state, necessarily resting on bureaucracy and dependent upon system and regulated procedure, centring all spheres of power in the hands of one man – whose leadership style was utterly unbureaucratic and whose approach to rule was completely unsystematic, resting as it did on a combination of force and propaganda – could only produce administrative chaos amid a morass of competing authorities. But this same organizational incoherence was the very safeguard of Hitler’s power, since every strand of authority was dependent on him. Changing the ‘system’ without changing its focal point was impossible. Hitler was incapable of reforming his Reich; nor, in any case, could he have any interest in doing so. He continued, as ever, to intervene wilfully and arbitrarily in a wide array of matters, often of a trivial nature, undermining as he did so any semblance of governmental order or rationality.
Goebbels and Speer did not immediately give up their efforts. Together with Ley and Funk, they met Göring for three hours on 17 March, going over much of the same ground that they had covered when they had met the Reich Marshal earlier in the month in Berchtesgaden. The upshot was no more than an agreement that Göring would propose to the Führer in the near future that he ‘activate somewhat the German leadership at home’ by resurrecting the Ministerial Council and adding to it Speer, Ley, Himmler, and Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister even manipulated Göring into accepting him as his deputy in the running of the intended weekly meetings.66 Predictably, nothing came of it. During April, Göring was included by Lammers, with Hitler’s approval, in two meetings of the ‘Committee of Three’, dealing with the application of the Führer Decree on Total War to the occupied territories. His antagonism to the Committee seems thereafter largely to have evaporated.67 As so often, Göring’s initial energy soon gave way to lethargy. In any case, his star had sunk so deep in the wake of further heavy air-raids that he must have realized how little realistic hope he had of gaining Hitler’s backing for any new position of authority. A diplomatic illness – whether or not associated with his sizeable daily intake of narcotics is not known – came to his aid.68 April ended with him prescribed bed-rest by his doctor.69 As Speer was to comment laconically, it was only in Nuremberg, on trial for his life, that Göring came fully to life again.70
Goebbels was still talking as late as September of finding enough support to block Lammers’s attempt (as the Propaganda Minister saw it) to arrogate authority to himself on the back of a Führer decree empowering him to review any disputes between ministers and decide whether they should be taken to Hitler.71 But by that time, there was scant need of intrigue to stymie the ‘Committee of Three’. It had already atrophied into insignificance.
Proposals to cut down on bureaucracy, simplify government administration, and save manpower were largely vitiated by Hitler himself. When faced with a decision on proposals to abolish a number of local government districts (Landkreise) and merge them with their neighbours, Hitler’s anti-bureaucratic instincts gave way to cautious conservatism. The districts would stay as they were. The office of the Landrat (district prefect) was especially important during wartime, wrote Bormann – doubtless echoing Hitler – in a letter to Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick on 15 June 1943. The wartime regulation of the economy (Zwangsbewirtschaftung) had greatly increased the public’s need for access to the Landrat’s office. Any trace of popular unrest had to be avoided. And, in any case, the manpower savings would be small.72
Hitler saw the ‘home front’, as always, mainly in terms of morale and would rule out any measures that might weaken it. He similarly blocked, partly at Lammers’s suggestion, attempts to simplify regional government and Länder administration.73 Even plans to dissolve the Prussian Finance Ministry, where there was extensive and unnecessary duplication with the Reich Finance Ministry, came to nothing. Hitler said he could not decide on the matter without consulting Göring about it. Göring implied he preferred reduction to abolition. By June, Bormann was left isolated in pleading for the abolition of the Ministry. Lammers was able to garner support for its retention, without personnel reductions.74
Almost the only achievement of lasting effect by the ‘Committee of Three’ during its nine months or so in action was a moratorium on the creation of new civil service posts.75 Its attempts to close down small businesses deemed unnecessary for the war effort came up with negligible results – and attained at a massive cost of alienation of those whose livelihood was threatened.76 Reports from the SD reflected the antagonism felt as small traders faced ruin through their shops being shut and the public, denied consumer outlets and already limited leisure pursuits, were alienated through the closure of bars and restaurants.77 One local SD report, from Bad Kissingen in Lower Franconia, summed up the mood: ‘The regard for the NSDAP has been gravely damaged by the intervention of the Party in the business closures and labo
ur deployment in the province. According to rumour, national comrades stricken by closures and by loss of relatives have pulled down and smashed pictures of the Führer in their homes.’78
The futility of the Committee’s efforts and the hopeless irrationality of government in the Führer state were revealed in all their starkness by the deliberations, lasting six months in all at one of the most critical junctures of the war, about whether to ban horse-racing. Goebbels tried to instigate a ban following complaints (he claimed) from Berlin workers about racing taking place on Sundays while they had to work. He demanded a directive from Hitler. Bormann and Lammers persuaded the dictator that workers should not be denied one of the limited forms of entertainment still available. But after a visit by Goebbels to Führer Headquarters, Hitler changed his mind and favoured a ban. He was now belaboured by various interested parties. Lammers eventually passed on a ruling that specific named racecourses were to be kept open. The Reich Defence Commissars (all of them Gauleiter) in these areas had permission to ban any race-meetings if they thought the needs of morale demanded this. The rest of the racecourses – along with bookies’ offices – were to be closed. Unsurprisingly, protests were immediately voiced by provincial Party bosses who felt their own areas were disadvantaged.
A dispute in Munich between Gauleiter Paul Giesler (brother of court-architect, Hermann) and the corrupt, roughneck city councillor Christian Weber, one of Hitler’s longest-standing cronies, had to go as far as the Führer himself to find its resolution. Weber was a classical product of the Party’s early days in Munich. A former pub-bouncer and beer-hall bruiser, he had been elevated in the Third Reich to a host of honorary offices in the ‘capital city of the Movement’, with an apartment in the Residenz formerly inhabited by the Kings of Bavaria. He was detested locally for the way he flaunted the wealth and power his favour with Hitler had brought him. Some scurrilously thought his advancement was to keep him from spilling unwelcome secrets about the Führer’s lifestyle in the early years. But Hitler would have had other ways of handling such indirect blackmail. Weber had certainly rendered Hitler valuable service in the Munich street-fighting days. His rise to local riches and notoriety was simply a particularly colourful expression of the gross corruption that was an endemic feature of the Third Reich. But at any rate, as an ‘Old Fighter’ – literally – from the earliest times, and owner (among many other things, including a monopoly of the regional bus service) of the racecourse at Riem, Weber had to be placated.79 So, however, did Giesler, Hitler’s most important lieutenant in Bavaria, and a fanatical supporter of the ‘total war’ drive. Hitler’s judgement-of-Solomon ‘decision’ was that racing should be banned at Riem (on the grounds that it could only be reached by car and bus, thus causing unnecessary petrol usage), but allowed in the city centre on the Theresienwiese.